Crypto king or conman: is Sam Bankman-Fried about to be sent down for a century?

Sunil Kavuri is not a novice investor. Sure, he hasn’t always been involved in finance: 20 years ago, he was a model. He and his identical twin brother were the stuff of local newspaper human-interest stories, straight-A lads from Rugby in Warwickshire who got firsts in economics, were both on the way to do master’s degrees in finance at Cambridge and got picked up by O2 to do the adverts for Big Brother. You might remember the ad: two floppy-haired guys horseplaying on a sofa.

After that, though, Kavuri worked for Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and then JP Morgan, leaving in 2012 to do his own investing. In 2015, he started investing in cryptocurrencies, mainly bitcoin, which he saw as “digital gold”: “It has all the attributes of gold, but it’s easier to store, so it’s better than gold.” The premise of bitcoin is that the supply is fixed at 21m, so it’s a finite resource. “I saw bitcoin as a better, more portable version,” he says.